My professional name is Donald M. Wilson, but my friend Doc Knowles calls me "The Professor"--mainly because I really AM a retired music professor (having been a teacher of music composition and theory for over 30 years at Bowling Green State University in Ohio). So when I needed to come up with a name for ShoutLife.com, it seemed to me that "The_Professor" would be appropriate. And since no one else had (as of 1/03/07) signed up for the Classical category under Music, I decided to try and be the first one there. So you can call me The Professor of Classical Music at ShoutLife.

But I am above all a Professing Christian. That is, I profess Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. I was saved at the Swedish Covenant church camp in Lake Geneva, WI, when I was 13. But I didn't really understand what it meant to be born again until nearly 40 years later when I started attending Lewis Avenue Baptist Church in Temperance, MI, the church where my wife-to-be had already gone for almost two decades. (You can see her photo with me at the top of this page and with our Texas grandkids at the top of the "About SMP" page.) It was only then that I started learning what it means to "live for the Lord."

In the fall of 1957 at the age of 20, [I began] my formal training as a composer. I studied harmony, counterpoint, analysis and music history.... I wrote Palestrina-like counterpoint, Bach-ish fugue and Hindemith-ian compositional exercises. The music department was then located in a house at 58th and Woodlawn, right behind Rockefeller Chapel (where I attended Sunday morning services during 1957-58)...